This book was planned nearly ten years ago to meet the need for a reader in Old English which would offer teachers and students two things: first, a range of texts far wider than the narrow canon available in the primers and readers in print; second, texts edited to modern standards of ‘userfriendliness’, in the way of presentation, glossing and annotation. The established canon is still properly represented in this volume but the addition of many new texts will I hope open up areas of Anglo- Saxon literary life which are usually ignored by all but the specialist, and will enable teachers at all levels to plan more adventurous courses. The innovations in presentation recognise the problems of today's readers, especially students in the many universities where modularisation has resulted in the compression of courses and the consequent demand that students do more in a shorter time (and with less supervision). They recognise also that few new readers of Old English today will have had the sort of rigorous linguistic training whose lack some of us spend so much time lamenting. The decision to supply every text with same-page glosses, in addition to explanatory notes that are fuller than in most previous works of this kind, was not taken lightly – not least because of the inevitable technical complications involved.